Air Europa customers warned their data may have been leaked

News
By Sead Fadilpašić
published

Another major airline suffers a data breach

Another major airline company has suffered a cyberattack which resulted in sensitive customer data leaking to the hackers.

A report from the Wall Street Journal claims Air Europa was hit by an incident discovered in October 2023. 

Earlier reports erroneously stated that the news had been confirmed by International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG), the Anglo-Spanish multinational airline holding company that's in the process of acquiring Air Europa.

Airlines under attack

The airline has reportedly sent out a breach notification email to affected individuals, telling them that their names, dates of birth, nationalities, ID cards, passport information, and phone numbers, have all been taken by the hackers.

We don’t know exactly how many people are affected by this incident, but Air Europa claims to service roughly 12 million people a year.

So far, there is no evidence of the data being misused on the dark web, but “If it were to happen, the resulting inconvenience would be limited in any case,” Air Europa allegedly said in the email.

Airlines are a popular target for hackers. In January 2024, one of the biggest aircraft leasing companies in the world suffered a ransomware attack that resulted in the theft of sensitive corporate data. AerCap confirmed the news in a 6-K form filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which it experienced a “cybersecurity incident related to ransomware”. 

The company played down the effect of the incident, noting, “We have full control of all of our IT systems and to date, we have suffered no financial loss related to this incident."

And In late November 2023, Gulf Air, the national air carrier for the Kingdom of Bahrain, confirmed suffering a data breach.  The “data breach incident” allegedly happened on November 24, and resulted in the compromise of “some information from its email and client database” due to unauthorized access.

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Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.